Little Puzzler

Just a quick post so you don’t think that I have dropped off the planet. There has been a great deal of goings on in the Oh Waily household. That has made my blogging time even less available than before. Without being too mysterious, there are significant changes in the wind for us – for those who don’t already know – and we are rather preoccupied with that. All shall be revealed shortly. Maybe too shortly for those of us trying our best to get organised !! It should, however, make for more blogging.

Anyway, enough of the life changing things and on to the vastly more important subject of Miss Oh Waily.

The little Miss has been up to quite a bit recently and I have fallen behind in recording it to share here. We’ll start with Miss Oh Waily and the puzzles.
She has been working on her puzzle skills for a while now. It began with these dinosaur puzzles that her Gran & Pop Oh Waily bought for her.

Dinosaurs

They are fairly simple, four piece puzzles which come four dinos to a box. She got the hang of them pretty much in one day, but they kept her interest for a while afterwards – mostly for making and then playing games with them. It made me go look on the interweb to update my dinosaur recognition and naming skills, and we now have some clue about tyrannosaurus rex (who doesn’t after Jurassic Park), triceratops, diplodocus and stegosaurus. But in fairness to any palaeontologists out there, I did only do a best guess for diplodocus since the cartoon is a bit vague.

After the dinosaurs I really struggled to find a suitable “in between” size for her to do. In the end I caved in to our family passion for visiting the zoo and went with a double sided floor puzzle with many of Miss Oh’s favourite animals.

Puzzle with Friend

It was a big jump up from 4 pieces to 44 pieces, but I began by being a helping hand. It didn’t take long for the pattern recognition skills to kick in. We nearly always start with the giraffe – he’s a bit big and hard to miss.

Little Puzzler

Here’s the Little Puzzler with the finished object. The flip side was avoided for quite some time as it was not as distinctive as the zoo animals. It is three tigers (also an inducement to buy the puzzle), that require a considerable step up in pattern recognition. Miss Oh can do it now, but still requires me as a helper. This is simply to keep her interested enough to get past the “it’s getting too hard” stage. The zoo on the other hand is no longer really challenging enough so she often starts it but then gets bored and wants to walk away and do something else. Sometimes it’s hard to get just the right balance.

My next problem is – where do I go with puzzles from here? Does anyone have a suggestion for a great puzzle to take her on to the next stage?